Booooo….. and thank you, please!

A couple of years ago I got really grumpy about Halloween. For years I’d lived in places where Halloween wasn’t observed, and I rather missed the good old days when I’d get upwards of a hundred wee ghouls and princesses and ghosts and hobos at my door. Now, back in North America, living in the…

Read More

Attention. Shhhh…..

I woke up this morning, for some reason, at about 6:15, a good hour before I usually do. However, my Best Beloved was on his way out to NYC for a couple of days, and perhaps something in me just wanted to give him a big kiss before he left. I hate having him go,…

Read More

The new book is here!

No matter how old I get, no matter how many books I’ve published, there’s something about the moment when the doorbell rings and the man at the door says, “Delivery for Davis, six boxes of books,” that just makes me giddy. My new book arrived this morning! And like any new parent, I think it’s…

Read More

Reconciliation. Compassion.

Here’s the dilemma — as a writer, I feel some responsibility to write about what’s bugging me. It is, after all, in the job description. On the other hand, I’m a novelist, not a journalist, not a damn pundit, and my readers have granted me, through their support, the privilege of spending my days, as…

Read More

Unfettering my imagination

Joan Didion once said, “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.” I’m trying to figure out when she meant by that, since to me all writing is shaping something into the finished thing. And both my novels — fiction, obviously — have taken considerable research. Even…

Read More

Leaf blowers & Stink Bugs & Bears

Oh, bliss. In the past two days I’ve managed to write over 2,000 words on my new novel, which makes me SO happy, and on top of that, I’m told the temperature will drop to the sixties by tomorrow and that it might well be gray and rainy. Joy! I see a directly connection between…

Read More

Bamburgh, Yeavering and home again

The weight of the sky on the Yorkshire moors. The ends of trips are, like any liminal states, difficult both to navigate and describe. There’s the physical stuff, of course – mounds of laundry, stacks of mail, all those must-do things that had been put aside for the trip, like washing the windows, getting the…

Read More

Holy wells and spirited conversation

I said I’d come back to York, and I’ll do so now, from a very strange hotel in Hartlepool (more on that below) So, York. Arriving, we took a bus from our hotel just up Tadcaster Road, into the walled center of town. A last gasp of warm weather and sunshine had called the entire…

Read More

Memory on the Moors

My Best Beloved and I are in the Yorkshire moors and after a day of climbing about the ruins of Whitby Abbey on the wild, windswept headlands, I am exhausted and exhilarated at once. We drove up from York yesterday — and I’ve yet to write about that fantastic experience, although I will in the…

Read More